An open letter: Secrecy and bullying on the Torrington school board

Leaders of the Torrington Board of Education have developed a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of elected officials and how local government must operate.

They are attempting to conduct the public's business in private, and to strip individually, independently elected public officials of their right and duty to communicate with voters, taxpayers and parents.

Consider this an open letter to Chairman Ken Traub, the Torrington Board of Education and School Superintendent Cheryl Kloczko, with a cc: to Mayor Ryan Bingham, members of the City Council and every parent, voter and taxpayer in the city.

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Very simply, you have no right under the laws of Connecticut and the Constitution of the United States to prohibit Board of Education members from writing letters to the editor, writing opinion columns, speaking to the press or directly or indirectly to parents, voters or taxpayers via any method that modern communication makes possible.

You have a basic, fundamental duty to conduct the public's business in public, and the fact that you went behind closed doors to discuss your illegal policy of prohibiting board members from speaking to the press was mind-blowingly inappropriate.

If an audio recording of that "nonpublic" session was made, it should be released to the public today.

Besides the fact that it never should have been closed to the public in the first place, here's a key reason we need to know what happened in that meeting:

A puzzlement as this issue has unfolded is why individual board members, who must know something about the First Amendment, and the rights and duties of elected officials, would agree to be muzzled? Letters to the editor - about innocuous, positive details of what the school district has been up to, mind you - were what sparked the recent closed-door meeting to discuss board member Vincent Merola's "conduct." After the meeting, Merola agreed to stop writing letters and apparently shut down his individual communication with the public. He wasn't even willing to talk to The Register Citizen about that decision, apparently for fear it would violate the board's "policy."

Merola has been an active member of the Northwest Connecticut chapter of the ACLU, one of the most staunch and active defenders of the First Amendment in the country. He must know how wrong and illegitimate and unconstitutional this policy is.

Which begs the question: What exactly is happening with the Torrington Board of Education behind closed doors? What kind of bullying was Merola subjected to by board members insisting on "one voice," as Chairman Traub has put it? What "consequences" have Merola and other board members been threatened with if they don't comply?

Traub told The Register Citizen that the board of education's policy of not allowing members to speak for themselves is designed to avoid having details of discussions leak out to the public before final decisions are made by the board. It confuses the public, he said, and the public jumps to conclusions when they see "the process" of different possibilities and points of view that might not ultimately win out.

Mr. Traub, the problem is that you are fighting against the very concept of open government and the public's right to know. It's what you signed up for as a member of an elected government board. It's not the board of a private company or nonprofit organization.

The public has the right to see and be involved in the process, and you should want them to exercise it, so they can influence decisions before they are made.

Even if you disagree with that concept, what's bizarre about using this as a rationale for not allowing members to speak for themselves (another reminder: you simply cannot do that!) is that every board discussion leading up to a final decision is open to the public, including every subcommittee meeting and even email exchanges between board members and other school officials about the public's business.

We'd like Mr. Traub and the other members of the Torrington Board of Education to understand that government in the United States was built this way from the belief that transparency and public knowledge protects the public and ultimately leads to decisions that are better for it.

If they did understand this, they'd officially rescind their illegal "policy," apologize to Mr. Merola and any other independently elected board members they've bullied into silence, apologize to the parents, voters and taxpayers of this city and take significant steps to invite the public into "the process" at every step.

It's extremely rare for The Register Citizen to put a column like this on the front page of our newspaper. It shows how far we feel the board of education has gone astray here and the implications it has for Torrington if not corrected immediately.

Matt DeRienzo is group editor of Journal Register Co.'s newspapers in Connecticut, including The Register Citizen, New Haven Register, Middletown Press and Connecticut Magazine. He can be reached at mderienzo@journalregister.com.